Skip to main content
Main

Essing Beef

A pickled beef prepared by seasoning with sugar, salt, saltpetre, and common salt, then boiled and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 37% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,435 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Essing Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Mix the sugar, coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and common salt together well.

  2. Rub the mixture into the brisket of beef.

  3. Place the beef in an earthen pan and turn it every day.

  4. Let it sit in the pickle for two weeks.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the beef and serve it with savoys, cabbages, greens, or pea pudding.

  2. Serve the beef cold, sliced.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + beeftop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Gives the cured beef its pink colour and a firm, cured texture.
Common salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat during the cure.
Coarse sugar
Balances the salt and softens the sharp, salty flavour of the cure.
Coarse sea salt
Penetrates the meat and helps preserve it during the long cure.

The step that matters

Turning the beef daily in the pickle. Turning keeps every surface in contact with the cure, so the salt and saltpetre penetrate evenly and the meat cures uniformly rather than unevenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More pickled beef recipes

Tongue 14Tongues 11Palates 5Spiced 4 See all 49 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes